The Assassination of President Moïse

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 581 Ratings

🗓️ 20 July 2021

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Pooja Bhatia talks to Thomas Jones about the assassination of President Moïse in Haiti, the recent history of US involvement in the country, and the difference between elections and democracy. Find Pooja Bhatia's writing on Haiti in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/seizeduppod Sign up to our Close Readings subscription: https://lrb.me/closereadings Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you enjoy listening to the LRB podcast, then you'll probably enjoy reading the LRB.
0:06.1	You can subscribe to the LRB from just one pound per issue.
0:10.7	To find out more, go to LRB.m.me forward slash listen.
0:16.1	That's LRB.m.m.m. forward slash listen.
0:23.8	Or click on the link in the description below this episode.
0:28.7	Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones.
0:34.1	And today I'm speaking with Pugia Bata, who's written on Haiti several times for the LRB over the past decade, and has a piece in the next issue of the paper on the assassination of President Jovanel-Mois on the 7th of July. Hello, Pugia, and thank you very much for
0:42.5	joining me. Hi, Tom. Thanks for having me. So maybe to begin, you could briefly take us through
0:48.8	what happened or as far as anyone knows for sure what happened in Porto Prance on the night of the 7th of July.
0:56.0	So the president was assassinated. The district judge who came in the next day to examine the scene
1:03.5	reported that he found his president's body shot 12 times. His left eye gouged out. Moise's wife, Martine, was also shot,
1:16.7	and she was taken to South Florida, where she convalessed. So she survived. Apart from Moise's family, the district judge reported that day that he was unable to interview anybody who was on the scene.
1:37.3	It was noted that Moise's presidential guard didn't seem to fight back, which made people wonder if they were
1:47.0	complicit in some way. For instance, it seems like there weren't shots fired apart from the
1:53.5	ones that the assassins discharged. So the next day, the Haitian police commenced a manhunt.
2:03.2	They, throughout the course of July 7th and July 8th, they arrested 20-some people, maybe
2:12.4	actually 17 people.
2:14.6	Several were killed in gunfights.
2:21.3	And I think about a half dozen, maybe eight remained at large as of Thursday or Friday following the assassination. The police said that the majority
2:30.0	of them, but for two of them, they were Colombian mercenaries. And two of them were Haitian
2:37.2	Americans who said that they were translators. It's really unclear whether the alleged mercenaries
2:46.5	did the job. There's a lot more going on in terms of the investigation. There's certainly
	...

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